The Yankee Network in 1936

1936 was a pivotal year in the history of Shepard's Yankee Network,
operating out of WNAC 1230. In 1932, WBZ/WBZA had been leased to NBC,
and were being operated as NBC Blue network stations. CBS saw the
benefits of this arrangement, and decided that it would do better to
control its Boston affiliate as well, and cut the middle-man (Shepard)
out of the arrangement. After being rebuffed by WLAW 680 in Lawrence,
CBS leased, and then exercised their purchase option on, WEEI 590, in
September of 1936 when the affiliation contract with WNAC ran out.
NBC was left looking for a new Red network affiliate, and found a
ready partner in Shepard's Yankee Network and its key station, WNAC.
According to ``The History of Boston Radio to 1941'', a doctoral
dissertation by Gerald W. Kroeger on file in the Boston Public
Library, the following stations were Yankee Network affiliates in
1936:

The WDRC-WNAC connection would later prove significant in the early
history of FM broadcasting in New England: Major Armstrong built a
demonstration FM inter-city relay network for Yankee, linking the
national networks in New York with WNAC by way of Meriden, Conn., and
Paxton, Mass.; those relay stations later became the first WDRC-FM and
WGTR (sister to WAAB) instantiations (neither of which were
successful).

Shepard also operated the
Colonial Network, key station WAAB, with
mostly the same set of affiliates; stations shown in bold above were
also Colonial stations. At this time, the Shepard radio interests employed
over 800 people in Boston.